Google officially buys Motorola, hits refresh on CEO

Google has officially bought Motorola Mobility and gifted Mountain View's senior veep Dennis Woodside with the task of the running the company.

Motorola's current CEO Sanjay Jha has been dropped in favour of Woodside - a Ironman triathlete who Google chief Larry Page described as being "phenomenal at building teams". Page also credited Woodside with "delivering" on some of the world's largest ad broker's "biggest bets".

Jha, on the other hand, received only a scant mention from the Google boss. Page said he had "stepped down" from the role having thrown his weight behind the search giant's Android operating system before the merger was proposed.

"It’s a well known fact that people tend to overestimate the impact technology will have in the short term, but underestimate its significance in the longer term. Many users coming online today may never use a desktop machine, and the impact of that transition will be profound – as will the ability to just tap and pay with your phone," the Google chief said.

Google coughed up $12.5bn to move into the mobile hardware game and bid to buy Motorola Mobility in August 2011. But regulators in the US and Europe stalled the proposed deal to review the competition aspects of the merger.

A major area of concern related to watchdogs sniffing out whether the pool of over 17,000 patents granted to Motorola (and over 7,000 still pending) would be used by Google to unfairly influence the market.

Officials on both sides of the Atlantic signed off the deal in February this year, finally clearing the way for the takeover. China also gave the merger its blessing just yesterday. ®